Why design will rise again in the era of GenAI

While the sensationalists and catastrophists are calling design firm, IDEO’s recent layoffs the “death of design”, I would argue that design has a critical role to play as we grapple with rapid technological advancement and the possibilities of the future. 

Design translates invention into innovation 

In the innovation world, there is a saying that “you pay for invention and innovation pays you” and throughout history, design has played a key role in translating invention into meaningful innovation. From the onset of the industrial era to the introduction of the smartphone there are many examples of the important role design has played. 

Engineering ingenuity spawned the industrial revolution, leading to inventions such as the combustion engine and assembly line. Over the years, the design of human and machine interfaces re-invented the work and worker experience making jobs safer and more productive. 

The invention of new materials and manufacturing techniques made mass-produced furniture possible. It was designers like Ray and Charles Eames, that showed how functional items, like a chair, could become expressions of style and status. 

Brands and consumer products existed long before Madison Avenue. However, it was the creatives that brought purpose and meaning to brands, creating the opportunity for personal connection. And industrial designers, in turn, reinforced the brand's potential, creating generations of product enhancements and line extensions that reinforced the brand’s meaning and utility in our lives. 

Through the management era, operations science and cost engineering came to the forefront. Corporations embraced lean and six sigma methods to drive efficiency and predictability, losing sight of the experience they created for their customers. In this case, it was design that broke through the cusps of homogeneity, using primary research techniques to understand the latent and unmet needs of users. Designers created compelling experiences that delighted customers and allowed companies to differentiate their offerings. 

With the introduction of digital technologies, like the smartphone and cloud computing, three major breakthroughs happened. First, the mobile channel emerged as a new interface for customer interaction. Second, the ability to capture, analyze and leverage data across channels unlocked the potential for new insights that could drive more personalized customer experiences. And finally, cloud hosting democratized developers' access to software, insights, and channels.  

In the app era, everyone became a developer, and it showed. For every great offering, there were hundreds that didn’t hit the mark for customers and users. It was in this era of digital invention that design was called upon to conceive delightful user interfaces and user experiences, that continue to be a source of differentiation across various sectors. 

Over the past two centuries, we have experienced significant advancements in just about every dimension of our lives. Through each era of advancement, we unlocked new capabilities, which made the formally infeasible, feasible. But invention alone did not make for energetic adoption or rampant advocacy. In each of these stories, it was design that was called upon to quickly follow the invention, make sense of it, and create something desirable to the humans that use it or interact with it. 

The ebbs and flows of design 

While some are arguing that IDEOs staff reductions are a sign of the death of design thinking, I would argue that design is simply going through another dip in a series of ebbs and flows that have persisted since the 60’s. The mad men are gone. IDEO was bailed out once before. Doblin changed hands several times, navigating the shifting demands for its utility. And the likes of Fjord, Market Gravity, Lunar and many others are now brandless, embedded capabilities in organizations. 

Design thinking isn’t dead, but its usefulness has become more widely understood and adopted, leaving specialist design firms needing to reinvent themselves. 

A new realm of feasibility 

For a moment, flash back to your early B-school strategy classes and recall those S-curves that show the slow, then accelerated growth of a business or industry. Eventually, the curve would come to a plateau, then decline. The current version of design has hit its plateau and is experiencing its decline. And like any growth strategist would predict, there will be the rise of a new growth curve. 

But before we go there, we need to acknowledge what is changing and why it makes this next evolution of design so particularly interesting and challenging. 

Technological breakthroughs over the last five years and last five months, are creating an endless amount of new potential in the realms of scalability, connectivity, intelligence, automation, and adaptability.  

From the advent of large-scale, publicly available cloud storage and compute capabilities to the software-as-a-service applications that streamline, automate, and elevate core business processes and on to the potential of AI, including its generative applications, a new set of inventions are just coming into the realm of feasibility and accessibility to most individuals and organizations. 

The issue, like with most inventions in their early days, is that it is extremely challenging to break through the current paradigms and orthodoxies to truly conceive, build, and launch innovation that will make a material difference for the individual and gain adoption by the organization. 

As a result, we typically play it safe by taking the design of today’s business and applying the invention to the existing processes, leading to some marginally better future state. 

We see this playing out in real time, as organizations, their Boards and the consulting firms that serve them, scramble to come up with the list of well thought-out GenAI use cases, that signal the innovation prowess, agility, and fitness of their organizations. 

And while there is value to be unlocked in applying cloud, SaaS, AI or Gen-AI inventions to core business processes, the underlying value propositions, channels, functions, capabilities, organizational design, and technology architecture of the organization, have remained largely untouched. 

The next era of design 

What is most interesting about this next era of technological feasibility is that the cloud, SaaS, AI or Gen-AI inventions in themselves are not constrained by our organizing constructs or individual competencies. They are not wed to our silos or cultures, nor the certifications of a select few. Rather, they are unlocking the potential of a much broader ecosystem of data, applications, models, individuals, and teams that don’t care about how your organization was set up to create value. 

For the most part, we have been limiting our use of these inventions to places where we have clarity of the problem in the current state and where we have a decent view to what the future state might look like. We are answering the ‘help me do my job better’ questions, vs. asking if there are better jobs to do and entirely different ways to do them. 

The shift from this direct form of problem solving to the more indirect and ambiguous one, is a difficult one for most individuals to make, and it is compounded when we ask the collective to consider new ways of being or doing, en masse. 

It is not to say that these direct forms of problem solving are not valuable but rather that left to their own devices as singular proofs of concept, pilots, or one-off projects, they will not move the productivity, innovation, competitiveness, or impact dials. Harnessing the power of these inventions to their fullest, most disruptive potential, will mean building confidence through direct efforts. But it will also mean having the courage to look beyond the business and operating models of today to assemble the potential of these inventions in new, responsible, and meaningful ways. 

Living into this future will require us to forego our adolescent reliance on purely intuitive practices. We will need to rely on our uniquely human traits of empathy, curiosity, creativity, and problem solving to take invention and turn it into game changing innovation. This is the new call to action for design. The future of design will not be relegated to a department, nor will it be mastered through a corporate training program. The future of design will be an approach that we will all choose to embrace, or risk being left behind. 

Embracing the discipline of design 

It will be this discipline of design that is called upon to flip orthodoxies and straddle over the high towers and silos of organizations to conceive new inspiring visions for what is possible. To shape the new order of things, CXOs, lawyers, accountants, engineers, computer scientists, college dropouts, main street entrepreneurs and everyone in between will be called upon to embrace the discipline of design. 

Conceiving this new future will require us to move beyond injecting our processes, offerings or solutions into the journey between issue and outcome. Rather, we will need to take the time for analysis, genesis and synthesis, before we can shape the full potential of these inventions into innovation. 

Our analysis will require us to deconstruct our existing strategies and business and operating models, confronting the reality that our current configuration of capabilities lacks the underlying know-how, capacity, and culture to change. This exploration will need to look internally and externally to amass the ideas and possibilities for the future. It will need to do so through a lens that makes this new possibility consumable to the citizens, customers, users and regulators that will need to embrace it. 

The genesis of this analysis will rely on an age-old design thinking mantra of “how might we…” to conceive the new strategies, models, offerings, work and experiences that will harness the potential of these inventions, making them consumable to their intended audiences, in a sustainably viable way.  

The synthesis of these newly conceived innovations will again, need to embrace the discipline of design to craft harmonious models of engagement for the intricate web of contributors and consumers that form the value ecosystems that are disrupted, drawn upon and engaged.  

Design is not dead. The current iteration has just become infused in our practices. The future of design, however, will increasingly become everyone’s responsibility as new inventions challenge our modes of operation and push us to wade uncomfortably into an ambiguous future. 

*To Jay Doblin... while we never had the chance to meet, your words and ideas live on. Thank you for your inspiration through A short, grandiose theory of design 

**To the many that have inspired my innovation and ecosystems journey

Terry S. Stuart Larry Keeley Peter Coughlan John Pipino Geoff Tuff Amelia Dunlop Tom Schoenwaelder Jeff Wordham Alex Morris Sarah Reid-Morris, PhD Kevin Reid-Morris Ariana Shadlyn Dejan Slokar Blaine Woodcock Gavin McTavish David Anthony Shachar (Shak) Parran Noreen Reid Shauna Emerson-O'Neill Shaunna Conway Alison Weyland Janice Wong Stephanie Smith Neal Halverson Phillip Ayoub, Ph.D. Ryan Pikkel Jesse Gaskin Jonathan Goodman Roger Martin